


The Sanest Ones

by w_anderingheart



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:36:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4734518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_anderingheart/pseuds/w_anderingheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do Kyungsoo is a magic show in a cage. Jongin is enraptured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posting. original post date: 27/4/15  
> warnings! mental health ambiguity, mentions of sexual content, slight sukai (but not really)

The room has been made to look like an office, although it clearly is not. The rug, old and washed out, is a bad attempt at a homey atmosphere. Against the far wall, the couch is rock hard and free of any potentially harmful objects. Like throw pillows, so that no one can be smothered to death. And in the centre of the sad room, the metal table at which they sit face-to-face is cleared off, except for the ballpoint pen in Jongin’s hand and his notepad. Even the pen, he’d been warned, may not be the best idea.  
  
Jongin waits for the door to latch closed. Through the small window, he sees the guard eyeing them warily, but Jongin simply smiles and inclines his head.  
  
Do Kyungsoo laughs under his breath, and Jongin shifts his gaze quickly to look at him. Considering everything he had heard about the man, Jongin had not been expecting open laughter from the first session.  
  
“That’s a bad idea,” Kyungsoo tells him.  
  
Jongin was not expecting him to initiate conversation either. He grabs his pen and notepad into his lap curiously, and without delay. That’s always what he’d been taught:  _they must see you as a friend._  
  
“How do you mean, Kyungsoo-ssi? Can I just call you Kyungsoo?”  
  
“I’m supposed to have twenty-four hour surveillance.” Kyungsoo reclines into his seat. “I’m not supposed to be alone with anyone, not without a guard.”  
  
“You wouldn’t speak freely with a guard in the room, though, right?” Jongin holds eye contact, although Kyungsoo isn’t exactly looking at him.  
  
The man places his hands atop the table, and the short chain of his handcuffs rattles against the metal surface. He leans in slightly. “You are my seventh counselor, Kim Jongin-ssi.”  
  
“So I’ve heard, yes.”  
  
“Want to know why?”  
  
“If you would like to share, then yes, sure.”  
  
In some vague space of time, they share a long look. Kyungsoo finally lifts his eyes, and Jongin sees only his own reflection in them. He can barely make out the shape of Kyungsoo’s pupils. The colour reminds Jongin, strangely, of spilt paint in water—sudden, stark, and captivating.  
  
“Are your knees shaking, Jongin?” Kyungsoo asks, fusing it with a smile as if he’s being polite. “Can I just call you Jongin?” Teasing.  
  
“Of course,” replies Jongin. Onto the ruled lines of his notebook, he begins to sketch a flower, and waits for a reaction.  
  
“What’re you writing about me?” says Kyungsoo, although it isn’t out of interest nor irritation. It’s a quiet statement, suspended, as if it’s a tossed bomb in the air and Kyungsoo is merely waiting for the right moment to smack it down or detonate it in Jongin’s face.  
  
“Absolutely nothing,” Jongin admits, putting the pen down. “I’d like to get to know you first.”  
  
When Jongin stares long enough, his eyes trace the veins at Kyungsoo’s neck, the smooth, white tone of his skin, all the way up to the slope of his small nose. He could pass for a teenager almost, if it weren’t for the way he stares back and meets every one of Jongin’s looks like they’re challenges he has already won.  
  
Kyungsoo scoots up on his chair. Their knees bump under the table. “See, you’re here trying to talk to me like I’m a ‘human being’,” he mimes air-quotes, “but the truth is, Jongin, you’re all the same to me—you’re all gentle-voiced assholes trying to play wise and sympathetic, when you’re actually neither.”  
  
His voice, if Jongin were to graph it on paper, would be a straight line across the X-axis, caught somewhere between jaded and menacing, although not less or more of either.  
  
“My bedroom is barred. I’ve got cuffs around my wrists. But you are wearing designer leather shoes,” Kyungsoo shakes his chains, and the rattling echoes off the beat-up walls. “You get what I’m saying?”  
  
It’s a rehearsed set of words. Jongin levels with Kyungsoo’s gaze, examines the edges of his thick, doll-like lashes. The set of Kyungsoo’s lips tells Jongin that Kyungsoo’s probably gotten away with many things, by speaking exactly like this. But clearly, if Jongin is lucky number seven, then he has to do what the others hadn’t.  
  
“Guard,” Jongin hollers. He stands from his chair, and pounds twice on the door.  
  
“What’s the trouble?”  
  
“No trouble,” says Jongin. “Remove the cuffs, please.”  
  
As the guard enters, reluctantly turning the key into the chain’s locks, Kyungsoo smiles, almost saccharine.  
  
“I think we’ll get along just  _great_ , Jongin.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Junmyeon looks up from his plate of gnocchi with a very concerned, very Junmyeon-esque frown. “A mental ward?”  
  
Jongin isn’t surprised. This is the exact reaction he had been expecting, especially from Junmyeon. “That’s dangerous, Jongin.”  
  
Jongin clutches the spoon in his hand, and stirs it tentatively without eating it. He’s not hungry, but he’ll need to eat it eventually because Junmyeon will insist on covering the bill, as he always does.  
  
“It’s—“ Jongin pictures Kyungsoo’s black eyes. Like paint in water—a simple phenomenon. “It’s many things.” Jongin spoons some soup into his mouth.  
  
He lets the warmth linger on his tongue and tries to focus on the aftertaste. Junmyeon carefully steers away the conversation. “We graduate with the same degree, and yet my first job was working with kids at a kindergarten,” he laughs lightly, showing all his straight, white teeth. “We’ve always been so opposite.”  
  
His face, in the afternoon sunlight, is handsome, if not the smallest bit reminiscent. Smiling, Jongin folds his hands and props up his chin. “Opposites do attract, hyung,” he says, before wishing he hadn’t. Jongin forgets, sometimes, that Junmyeon isn’t on the same chapter as him, even if Jongin mostly pretends not to notice.  
  
Junmyeon still smiles, in that manner of smiling that never looks fake; the sort only he can pull off. “Then maybe we aren’t  _that_ opposite, Jonginnie.”  
  
Sometimes, like these moments, Jongin watches the way Junmyeon’s eyes crinkle at the edges and how his skin glows in the light. And Jongin feels like he’s staring both into the past and a future at the same time—not  _his_ future, but  _a_  future. One he could have had, but knows he won’t. Maybe it would have been the sort of future with a nine-to-five job and a high-end studio apartment and warm, slow mornings that would have smelled like coffee. All the things he associates with Junmyeon.  
  
Jongin knows it’s not fair to drop someone you’d shared a bed with for three years. It’s even more unfair that although he reminisces, he never actually regrets.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
“Let’s try something.”  
  
Kyungsoo raises an eyebrow, a slight movement, but the general disinterest remains. He seems to amuse himself by making faces at the guard, who peers in every several minutes to make sure Jongin is still alive.  
  
On his notepad, Jongin jots down the small things. Not really what Kyungsoo says, but more the changes in his expression, which are irregular and interesting.  
  
“You can ask me about myself, just as much as I ask you about yourself. Sound fair?” asks Jongin. “I get a question, then you can get a question.”  
  
Kyungsoo purses his lips, and Jongin notes that down as a positive reaction.  
  
“Would you consider yourself short-tempered?” Jongin tries. “Like, maybe you’re set off by the tiniest things?”  
  
The most noticeable habit is that Kyungsoo touches his wrists, rubbing at the skin quite often. Jongin wonders if this is the only time he gets to lose the handcuffs. It’s a question Jongin would like to ask, but doesn’t.  
  
“I consider myself regular-tempered.”  
  
Jongin nods. He imagines Kyungsoo’s anger to be more slow-burning. Like fireworks, maybe—infrequent, but intense. “And?”  
  
“And I don’t get ‘set off’. People set  _me_ off.”  
  
A practiced skill, Jongin’s only reaction is a blink. “All right, then.”  
  
Kyungsoo leans in very slowly, and very deliberately. “My turn now.”  
  
“Yes, your turn.”  
  
There is a short pause. Kyungsoo rubs at the raw skin of his wrist again. “Any question?”  
  
For show, Jongin closes his notepad, tucking his pen behind his ear. “Shoot.”  
  
“Have you ever fucked a man?”  
  
Too easy. “Yes.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s eyes, like pools of ink, stay trained onto Jongin’s and neither looks away.  
  
“Have you ever  _been_ fucked by a man?”  
  
Jongin re-opens his notepad. “That was two questions.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Junmyeon’s apartment is on the top floor of a building in the area of the city that Jongin, or anyone with an average salary, very rarely ventures into.  
  
He rides the gold elevator all the way up, where a man in a suit presses floor number sixty for him. Jongin knocks evenly on the door when he arrives.  
  
Junmyeon is prompt. “Hey, I just finished cooking.”  
  
“It’s almost midnight, hyung,” Jongin toes his shoes off and places them onto Junmyeon’s impossibly organized shoe mat. “You didn’t have to cook for me.”  
  
“I knew you’d be hungry,” Junmyeon hollers from the kitchen.  
  
Jongin shows himself inside, sinking into the suede sectional in the living room. The mounted flat-screen is playing re-runs of a dorky variety show that Junmyeon really likes. “Yeah, you’re always right.”  
  
Junmyeon hands him a bowl of noodles and plops into the spot beside him, sighing.  
  
“Eat with me,” Jongin says.  
  
Junmyeon laughs. “I obviously ate already, Jonginnie.”  
  
With his chopsticks, Jongin holds some food up to Junmyeon’s mouth, and Junmyeon sputters, wiping the grease off his smooth skin. He immediately dives for a napkin on the coffee table.  
  
“You’re such a prince,” Jongin snorts.  
  
Junmyeon shakes his head with a chuckle, and they watch a group of young celebrities they don’t know try to complete an obstacle course under two minutes.  
  
“We’re getting old,” Junmyeon says, folding his arms across his chest.  
  
Jongin coughs on his food. “Uh, excuse you, but I’m not the one who’s already thirty?”  
  
Half-hearted, Junmyeon pinches Jongin’s thigh. “I know. I forget that sometimes, that it’s barely even been a year since you graduated.”  
  
They forget a lot of things sometimes, but sometimes it’s for the better. It’s easier to not think too hard, to not overanalyze, themselves. Like if Jongin stares at Junmyeon too long, his eyes will follow the shape of his jawline and his lips might remember how they used to feel on his skin.  
  
“You’re not that old, hyung.”  
  
“Neither are you,” Junmyeon says. His voice has gone flatter and quieter, and the psychoanalysts in both of them might have many things to say about that. But neither of them do. “But you always look so tired when I see you. Is work stressful?”  
  
Jongin thinks it should be. He wishes, almost, that he could describe work as ‘stressful.’ He thinks it’s a clean, normal-sounding thing to say.  
  
“Stressful?” Jongin echoes quietly.  
  
He sets down his half-empty bowl onto the coffee table. The television plays a beer commercial, but isn’t loud enough to fill in their silence. Jongin’s toes curl into Junmyeon’s heated flooring, warmth spreading through his socked feet. But the hand that finds itself on Jongin’s knee is even warmer.  
  
“Just tell me to stop.” Junmyeon matches his volume, and then he’s pulling Jongin’s face towards his.  
  
There’s a small noise, a short inhale, from the back of Jongin’s throat that Junmyeon swallows down. Jongin doesn’t tell him to stop. Jongin doesn’t do anything but stop thinking. He lets Junmyeon pull their clothes off, lets him push him back into the cushions, positioning himself over him.  
  
Junmyeon fucks Jongin the way he does just about everything—with care and purpose, and Jongin should feel bad but he can’t. Not when his vision goes white and the sensitive spot behind his ear is warm and slick with Junmyeon’s breaths.  
  
The springs of the couch bounce beneath them as Junmyeon rolls onto his side. Their bodies feel heavy. Time seems to resume from where it had suddenly froze. For a very long moment, they both don’t know what happens next. Junmyeon is a smart man, and he knows he shouldn’t expect anything.  
  
And he is right. But Jongin, unfairly, reaches an arm out and strokes the pretty curve of Junmyeon’s jaw, sitting up to kiss the corner of his mouth sweetly.  
  
Jongin would wonder, and eventually assume, that Junmyeon always knew, despite it all, that Jongin would never stick around for him and this compartmentalized life.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Several sessions go by similarly. Kyungsoo resumes his dead-eyed stare, and asks Jongin to extend the length of their meetings only so that he can spend a longer time without his handcuffs.  
  
“You know how you could  _really_ help me?” Kyungsoo tells him, a few weeks later, “You could bring me body lotion. For my wrists.”  
  
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”  
  
“Jeez, what are you good for then?”  
  
Today, Kyungsoo has opted for the couch. He’s lying on his back, Freudian style, as Jongin sits at the table with his legs-crossed.  
  
“Do you dream?” Jongin says. Kyungsoo scrunches his nose, like he’s heard that one too many times and Jongin figures he probably has.  
  
“Sure I do,” Kyungsoo answers. He stands up from the couch and rolls the kinks out of his shoulders. “This fucking couch is worse than concrete.”  
  
“Can you share any dreams that you remember?”  
  
The slightest smirk pulls up the corner of Kyungsoo’s mouth. He gives Jongin that look that he so often does, the one that’s both equal parts challenging and bored.  
  
“Oh, that wouldn’t be appropriate,” Kyungsoo drawls.  
  
“I’m here to counsel you,” Jongin says. “You can tell me anything.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s eyes glint, a flash of white on a black canvas. He sits down at his chair across from Jongin. “You can take it?” His voice, which Jongin tries to monitor, suddenly dips a little, and Jongin can no longer pinpoint it, as if he had been holding it in his hand but now it’s slipped through his fingers.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t wait for an answer. “I dream about you.”  
  
“What sort of dreams?” asks Jongin.  
  
Kyungsoo’s voice adapts a particularly melodious quality. It tends to do that, Jongin notices, whenever Kyungsoo is in the mood to talk. In some ways, Jongin thinks Kyungsoo’s voice is always like that—like a song that only he has the sheet music for. “You really want to know, Jongin-ah?”  
  
“If you want to tell me, then yes.”  
  
There’s a pause. Kyungsoo traces aimless patterns into the metal tabletop, light, invisible strokes with his index finger. “Can I ask my question first?”  
  
Jongin shrugs, and lets him have his way. He needs to do that sometimes—let Kyungsoo know that their conversations are on an equal field. “All right.”  
  
“How’s your boyfriend?” says Kyungsoo.  
  
A loud silence. A shock of electricity, and Jongin’s lungs seem to inflate with rocks—a sudden, heavy explosion when he takes a breath. Heat prickles the skin on his arms and down his toes. “I don’t have one,” he says.  
  
His mouth parts, then closes. He can see Kyungsoo register the movement in his black, muddled eyes.  
  
“No? Then who’s that handsome, rich face you’re always with?” He rests his head into his open palm, pensive. Prying.  
  
The heat pokes through Jongin’s flesh like needles, wraps around his throat in a solid grip. Kyungsoo regards him with something playful. He’s waiting, Jongin can tell—waiting for Jongin to ask him  _how_. Waiting for a glimpse of fear, in hopes that Jongin will break.  
  
But Jongin doesn’t give in. He won’t. Kyungsoo is an intricate puzzle, and Jongin is fascinated, not afraid.  
  
“A sunbae,” Jongin replies smoothly. “From school.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s lips pull in, expression pinched. “Hmm.”  
  
Faintly, Jongin rubs the goosebumps at his neck, the smallest sign of nervous energy. But still, Kyungsoo notices, smiling like he’s won this round.  
  
“Dreams,” Jongin says again, claiming the wheel while he has the chance.  
  
Kyungsoo leans forward as he places both hands on the table. He has small, white hands. Like a child’s, except Jongin sees anything but a child when their gazes level.  
  
“I dreamt about you bending me over this table,” he tells Jongin. “Me pressed up against this cold, fucking metal, and you telling me how pretty I looked.”  
  
Jongin taps his finger twice on his closed notepad. “Does that happen often? These dreams?”  
  
“Why?” Kyungsoo cuts in. “You want to psychoanalyze that too?” His expression is a little tired, if not a bit vulgarly suggestive, though Jongin has let enough get under his skin today so he pretends it’s just the lighting in the room that deepens the shadows of Kyungsoo’s dark lashes, and is making Jongin imagine things.  
  
“I  _am_ a psychology major, Kyungsoo.”  
  
Kyungsoo hums, as if this is new information and he doesn’t care about it. “Maybe,” he whispers, and the tone makes Jongin think of cold marbles sliding down his spine, “you’re just trying to overcomplicate things where you don’t need to.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
The first time Jongin meets another counsellor close to his age, is two months into his position. The new guy is tall and thin with the smooth lines and long legs of a runway model. He looks incredibly out of place in any area of the facility. When Jongin sees him one morning in the security entrance, he thinks the guy is a visitor. Or a tourist that got very, very lost.  
  
Until later, in the cafeteria, the man introduces himself as Oh Sehun, still a student, finishing up a final year and doing his internship here.  
  
“You know this is a mental ward, right?” Jongin says aloud once, before re-considering his tone. But Sehun, he learns, has a sharper tongue than his baby-face lets on. Somehow, Jongin finds him easy company.  
  
“How many nutcases do you see in a week, by the way?” Sehun asks him. Jongin has adapted to Sehun’s dialect, and translates that to mean: how many cases is he in charge of. “They gave me four, and three of them still won’t talk to me.”  
  
Jongin pokes a lettuce leaf tentatively. “I only have one.”  
  
“What?” Sehun’s expression sours, although his face is sort of always pinched. It makes him look perpetually bratty. “Can we trade, please?”  
  
“My guy is Level Four, though,” Jongin replies, as way of explanation. “They probably think I need all my energy to deal with him.”  
  
Sehun whistles lowly. “Level Four security? Damn, you must get paid double. I have this one guy, Level Two nutcase, and he actually talks more than my other three combined. Non-fucking-stop.”  
  
A loud crash comes from the serving line at the food station, and saves Jongin from further conversation. They crane their necks to check the noise and find the dirty dishes rack has toppled over, shattered plates strewn across the floor. The guards block the area off immediately, before anyone can claim the broken glass as a weapon.  
  
At the centre of the buzz is a young man with the same, lifeless outfit as all the other patients. Except when the guards go to scold him, he pouts bashfully and flashes them a very warm smile. He’s let go with nothing more than a warning. Jongin cocks an eyebrow curiously.  
  
“Byun Baekhyun,” Sehun says, lifting a glass of water to his lips.  
  
“Sorry?”  
  
“That pretty-boy. He’s my Level Two,” Sehun explains. He sloshes his drink around in his glass, watching the water swing back and forth like a boat on the sea. “He is  _vicious_. A real, run-of-the-mill sociopath—looks totally normal. Those are always the ones to watch out for.”  
  
Jongin goes back to his food. “The way he smiles, though. And controls his expression—it makes him seem like a guy that sort of wandered in here by accident,” he says.  
  
“Run-of-the-mill sociopath,” Sehun restates, nodding, and lifts his glass up as if in toast. Then he stands up with his tray. “I got a one o’clock session. See you ‘round.”  
  
He tucks his seat in with a little kick of his foot, and for a while afterwards, Jongin wonders about Kyungsoo’s life outside of the four walls of their sessions.  
  
He wonders, if Kyungsoo wasn’t on Level Four security and was actually allowed in here, what sort of meals Kyungsoo would pick and what sort of conversations he’d conduct. Jongin wonders if it’d be any different. He’d like to know, but it would be impossible to. His job isn’t to dig, after all. It’s only to analyze what he’s given. To read between the lines of Kyungsoo’s words, decipher his thoughts, and hopefully re-write the fine print of his conscience.  
  
The question that remains, however, is if there is even a conscience to begin with.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
A tray clatters on the table. Across from Jongin, the chair scrapes loudly on the floor. Jongin looks up from his notes, into Byun Baekhyun’s crescent-shaped eyes. Even up close—or maybe it’s  _especially_ close, Jongin can’t decide—Baekhyun’s presence radiates a strange sense of warmth that’s almost transcendent. Like the kind of person you’d encounter in a dream that would either be an angel or a serial killer.  
  
“Do you mind?” he gestures to the seat politely. Jongin gets the feeling he’s not in any place to refuse.  
  
“Of course not,” Jongin says and tucks his notes away into its folder. He would shake Baekhyun’s hand, but Jongin isn’t sure if he’s allowed to. “I’m Kim Jongin.”  
  
“Oh, I know,” Baekhyun replies, and his tone carries the same steadiness but something in the way he smiles makes Jongin straighten in his seat. “My name’s Byun. Byun Baekhyun.”  
  
“I know that too.”  
  
Baekhyun grips his plastic fork with a wide grin. “Good. That makes me feel less weird,” he says.  
  
Jongin doesn’t quite know how to reply. In some ways, Baekhyun’s openness hides more of his personality than Kyungsoo’s black eyes hide his. Smiles are universal and easy to fake. Jongin finds them the hardest to read.  
  
“How do you know me?” asks Jongin, pushing his empty plate to the side. Carefully, he wraps his fork and knife away in a napkin, puts it out of reach under his hand. If Baekhyun notices or is offended, he doesn’t show it.  
  
He shrugs. “From wherever. You know, there  _is_ such thing as mental ward gossip.” With his fork, he pierces a grape from a bowl of fruits on his tray. The juice dribbles down the grape’s green exterior, but Baekhyun makes no move to eat it. “How about me?”  
  
“Your counsellor. Oh Sehun,” Jongin says.  
  
Baekhyun tips his head back in a loud laugh. The guards look over. “Sehun is a cute one, isn’t he? It looks like you could snap him in half, but then he starts talking and you realize he could snap you with his words alone.”  
  
Jongin hums. There is an interesting curve to Baekhyun’s eyes and cheekbones when he smiles. Jongin tries to study his face without staring too hard—tries to find some window into his thoughts. If there is one, however, it’s too blurry to see through.  
  
“So. You’re D.O’s guy, right?” Baekhyun’s fingers, long and thin like a pianist’s, pull back the flaps on a carton of chocolate milk.  
  
“D.O?” Jongin frowns.  
  
Baekhyun pauses. “Do Kyungsoo.”  
  
“Oh,” says Jongin, and doesn’t know if he should be making mental notes all of a sudden. He doesn’t know if he should halt the conversation altogether. He isn’t supposed to talk about work, much less to another patient.  
  
But there’s still that strange quality in Baekhyun’s eyes that tells Jongin that anything Jongin says probably won’t be news to Baekhyun.  
  
“Yes. I am,” Jongin follows up. “You’re a… friend of his?”  
  
Baekhyun laughs again, even louder. The guards don’t glance in their direction this time. “Friend? No, no.”  
  
He releases the grape he had stabbed with his fork from its confines. Jongin watches him press his nail into the fruit, as he begins to peel the skin off in clean strokes. “That’s why I’m telling you—man to man. Do Kyungsoo is real fucked up.”  
  
He pulls off piece by piece of the skin’s exterior, and when the grape is completely naked, he plops it back into its bowl and starts munching on the peeled skin.  
  
Jongin steeples his fingers. “I know that,” he tells Baekhyun.  
  
“No, I mean—“ Baekhyun frowns, pinching a strand of grape flesh between his thumb and index finger. “You don’t know everything about that guy. Maybe you don’t know anything about him.”  
  
The latter is truer.  
  
“We’re all fucked up. The sanest ones are the ones who can agree with that,” Baekhyun says, matter-of-fact. He picks up another grape. “But Do Kyungsoo’s another story. He’s a grade A actor.”  
  
Jongin considers. “Isn’t everyone kind of an actor?”  
  
“Oh sure,” Baekhyun waves his hand around. “But I mean he’s the sort of actor that makes you wonder what’s true. This is a place of crazies. And D.O’s the craziest of us all.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
“I had another dream.”  
  
Jongin looks up from his notepad. It had been quiet for a while. Kyungsoo is lying on his back on the couch again, but he sits up as Jongin uncaps his pen.  
  
“Yeah? Want to tell me?”  
  
“You were sucking me off on this couch.”  
  
Kyungsoo’s eyes are always heavy, like there’s something behind the black curtain that Jongin can’t see. Kyungsoo never looks like he’s joking.  
  
“Why do you think you have these dreams?” asks Jongin.  
  
A tiny shrug. Kyungsoo has narrow shoulders. He lifts them in a lazy movement, and Jongin thinks he looks small with his back hunched and his head bent over. Sometimes there are moments like this—where Kyungsoo is so shockingly frail that Jongin wonders if he’ll shatter into glass if Jongin so much as speaks.  
  
“You tell me,” Kyungsoo answers. Then he stands up, a sudden movement, and the moment vanishes. Jongin sometimes thinks he imagines the frailty. Other times, he wonders if Kyungsoo creates it. Like an actor.  
  
Either way, from session one until now, Jongin hasn’t been able to connect a single piece of Kyungsoo’s intricate puzzle.  
  
“Okay,” Jongin says. “How do you feel about yourself?”  
  
Kyungsoo snorts. “What?”  
  
“Your opinion. On yourself. What do you think?” Jongin avoids stuff like  _self-esteem_ _._  He finds that certain words make Kyungsoo feel like he’s a teenager being talked down to.  
  
Jongin watches Kyungsoo’s eyes tilt up to the ceiling. He likes the feeling of the light, warm on his eyelids. He’s never said that, but Jongin has guessed.  
  
“You pay attention to me,” Kyungsoo says, after a very long time. “Maybe that’s why I dream.”  
  
His head is resting against the back of the couch, neck exposed and chin sticking out. There’s a pulsing movement at his Adam’s apple. Jongin studies the smooth skin, imagines how it would feel if he were to touch it. A tingling sensation prickles his fingertips—a phantom feeling.  
  
“Am I the only person in your life who does?” Jongin has to cough so that the words come out properly.  
  
Kyungsoo hums, neither a yes or no.  
  
“I just feel human in here,” he says.  
  
He lifts his head then, cocking it to the side. The light clings to his eyelashes. Then he stands, walks over to Jongin in three large strides. Kyungsoo peers down at him and lifts his hand. He waits for a reaction. Jongin doesn’t move. Kyungsoo traces a finger along Jongin’s jawline, feels the goosebumps that spark up in the wake of his touch.  
  
He shakes his wrists with a smirk. “Or maybe it’s just the lack of handcuffs.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
One afternoon, Jongin takes a wrong turn and ends up in the visitors’ area. Sehun stands behind the glass window with his arms crossed.  
  
“Yo,” says Sehun, as way of greeting.  
  
Jongin grunts. “What’re you doing here?”  
  
Sehun points vaguely with his chin. “One of my nutcases has a visitor today. I wanted to see who it was.”  
  
“You really shouldn’t call them that,” Jongin comments, offhandedly, though Sehun has selective hearing so it only goes over his head. “I forgot about visiting hours.”  
  
He’s never asked Kyungsoo about friends. He figures it’s too prying.  
  
“Really? Your guy is always here though.” Sehun taps the glass. Jongin follows his finger to where Kyungsoo sits at a far table, his back to them. Across from him, a man with dyed red hair and large ears. He’s got a spike through his cartilage.  
  
Jongin studies them. The casual grin across the man’s face. The brush of their legs under the table. Kyungsoo leans back into his chair as he laughs. It’s not friendly or romantic. It’s not distant or careful. It’s like their strangers discussing a common interest—a bond that’s not personal, but a bond nonetheless.  
  
“Do you know him?”  
  
“Oh, that guy? That’s Park Chanyeol,” Sehun says. Jongin doesn’t ask how he knows. He’s come to assume that Sehun’s database is large. “He visits Kyungsoo a lot.”  
  
“How do they know each other?” Jongin asks. Chanyeol sits at the edge of his seat, palms open and face-down on the table between them. The line of his mouth goes tense when he stops to let Kyungsoo talk.  
  
Sehun shrugs, shifting his weight. “All I’ve heard was Chanyeol had been serving time in prison—real prison—up until a few months ago. But how do they know each other? That’s the thing no one really knows. Unless you’re federal authorities, maybe.”  
  
“Illegal stuff?”  
  
“Very illegal.” Sehun pauses. He uncrosses his arms, gaze pointed. “Did they not tell you what Kyungsoo is in here for?”  
  
Through the glass, they watch Chanyeol rise from his chair. His cartilage piercing catches the light as he stands. Then he leaves, without, it seems, a goodbye.  
  
“I didn’t want to know,” Jongin says. “I thought it would be best to be unbiased.”  
  
Sehun whistles low. “We aren’t lawyers, Jongin. We don’t have to avoid asking the client whether they’re guilty or not.” He shoves his hands into his jeans, and Jongin considers his words and the space between their mentalities. “They’re already guilty of something and we’re not here to be their saviours.”  
  
A guard helps Kyungsoo stand from his chair. The chain is attached to the cuffs, and then Kyungsoo is escorted out of the room. He winces when he moves his wrists, but only Jongin notices.  
  
“I’m no savior, Sehun,” Jongin says, turning to leave. “Their minds are puzzles. Unsolvable puzzles. And I get a kick out of trying to put together the incongruent pieces.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Jongin abandons his notepad. He had a while ago, actually. He can’t remember exactly when, just that at some point between one session and the next he realized that everything Kyungsoo does and says gets imprinted into his mind anyways. And eventually, writing it down just seemed redundant.  
  
Today they’re sitting at the table. Jongin in his usual spot, and Kyungsoo in front of him with his feet off the ground and legs crossed, as if he was at home watching television.  
  
“How are those dreams coming along?”  
  
Kyungsoo fits his chin into his palm, pursing his lips. “Mmm, you really want to know?” He blinks, and his black eyes make Jongin think of free-falling through a bottomless well—waiting for something to happen, but not knowing  _what_ exactly.  
  
Kyungsoo’s suggestive eyelash flutters are back. Jongin wets dry lips and shrugs. “Only if you want me to know. You know how it works by now.”  
  
He waits for Kyungsoo’s reply. Sometimes Kyungsoo takes a long time, but Jongin lets him have all the time he wants.  
  
“I’ll show you.”  
  
Jongin swallows. “What?”  
  
“Stand up,” Kyungsoo says, and he unfolds his legs, rising from his chair. Jongin hesitates but only for a second. Maybe it’s foolish—it should be foolish—but nothing about Kyungsoo scares him.  
  
Jongin stands slouched slightly against the table. Kyungsoo lines up in front of him, facing him. “This is what you dream?” asks Jongin. He doesn’t imagine it in his head as a whisper, but it comes out as one.  
  
“Almost,” Kyungsoo replies. Then his small hands travel up the length of Jongin’s arms, curling past his shoulders until they rest, encircled, at Jongin’s neck. Their position, for a moment, reminds Jongin of innocent things like children playing pretend or teenagers at a school dance.  
  
He searches, once more, Kyungsoo’s black eyes. He thinks about paint in water, how it explodes and blooms. Kyungsoo steps forward, aligning their bodies. The innocent thoughts in Jongin’s mind die a little.  
  
Kyungsoo doesn’t kiss his mouth. He kisses the corner of his mouth, tongue darting out, leaving a moist spot on Jongin’s skin that engulfs him in a shivering heat. Kyungsoo keeps moving, never detaching, across Jongin’s jaw—“This jaw,” Kyungsoo whispers, unless Jongin’s mind is just hazy—until he’s biting the pulse at Jongin’s neck.  
  
Suddenly, Jongin finds his hands locked around Kyungsoo’s waist, pressing their bodies even closer together, their hips brushing as if asking for more. Coiled heat in their guts, waiting to be unfurled. Paint explosions in water.  
  
“You do that in my dream too,” Kyungsoo tells him. Then, against Jongin’s lips, “You pay attention to me.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
“Why don’t you ever ask me what I’m in for?”  
  
Jongin shifts on the couch. “Is that something you’d like to share?”  
  
Lifting his legs off the ground, Kyungsoo crawls the length of the couch on his knees towards Jongin, like a cat. “You know, when you first walked in here, I thought: hell, it’s some wide-eyed young kid, pretty boy,” Kyungsoo says, leaning his face in close. Their mouths aren’t touching, but just barely so. “And I thought: this kid’s going to have a heart like melted butter.”  
  
They breathe each other’s air. Kyungsoo smells like dust and white heat—nothing. “Were you wrong, then?” asks Jongin.  
  
Kyungsoo reaches a hand out, cupping Jongin’s warm neck as if to choke him. In his chest, Jongin can feel his heart beating against the walls of his body. It’s not a nervous tempo. It’s an anticipating one.  
  
“You know why you’re my seventh counsellor?” Kyungsoo says. He holds onto Jongin’s neck tighter. If the guard were to come by now, Kyungsoo’s hands would probably get shackled forever.  
  
“Because I get off on breaking people—breaking in every sense of the word.”  
  
And suddenly, Jongin isn’t sure if Kyungsoo is a puzzle he even wants to solve. Maybe Jongin just wants to keep finding new, implacable pieces—an excuse to keep holding on. Maybe he never wants this shivering adrenaline to end.  
  
“Is that what you want? To break me?”  
  
“Oh, yes,” Kyungsoo says, colour flashing through his eyes. “In all sorts of ways.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
The only time Jongin ends up reading a profile is by accident, and so naturally, it’s Sehun’s fault.  
  
He agrees to help Sehun sift through the paper archives, because the file he’s looking for is too old to be in the new computer systems. An hour later, Sehun exclaims in rejoice.  
  
“Found it?” Jongin comes out from behind a stack of boxes to join Sehun at the dusty table in the middle of the room.  
  
“No,” says Sehun. “But I did find Park Chanyeol’s full record.”  
  
“Fucking hell.”  
  
“Oh, come on,” Sehun’s already opened it. “Aren’t you at least a little curious?”  
  
He thumbs the papers without waiting for an answer, laying them out across the table. The air in the small room, clumped and stuffy, fills Jongin’s lungs up uncomfortably. He eyes the papers.  
  
“Jeez,” Sehun says.  
  
“Fuck.”  
  
“Wish you hadn’t read it?” asks Sehun, drumming his fingers on the tabletop, as if daring Jongin to say no.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Towards Christmas, Jongin brings Kyungsoo body lotion for his wrists. He pulls the bottle from his bag, placing it on the table between them. Kyungsoo bursts into laughter.  
  
“I think you owe me,” says Jongin, as Kyungsoo pops the cap of the bottle experimentally.  
  
Kyungsoo snorts. “Oh, sure. I’ll just go out and get the latest model of those expensive leather shoes you love.” He kicks Jongin under the table, as if to make his point. He misses, though, and gets Jongin’s shin instead.  
  
Jongin watches Kyungsoo squeeze the lotion onto his skin. It comes out in thick, white layers. Jongin swallows. “The shoes were a present,” he tells Kyungsoo, and doesn’t know why. Kyungsoo eyes him then looks away. “I don’t really buy stuff like that.”  
  
“A present from your boyfriend?” asks Kyungsoo. With his index finger, he pokes the lotion on his skin that he squeezed out, but doesn’t rub it in.  
  
As Jongin watches every detail of Kyungsoo’s delicate face, Baekhyun’s words ring through his skull, between his ears, threatening to come alive before him.  _The craziest of us all._  
  
The look in Kyungsoo’s eyes is daring, like he’s a magician who wants to reveal his secrets, and is only waiting for Jongin to ask. But, after all, learning the secret to the trick always ruins the magic. And maybe Kyungsoo is magic to Jongin, a spectacle Jongin wants to continuously be amazed by.  
  
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Jongin says. He watches Kyungsoo purse his lips, and let the topic die. Then he holds out his wrist towards Jongin, the one he squeezed lotion onto.  
  
Jongin reaches forward, rubbing the lotion into the red skin in slow circles. “Do you have any friends?”  
  
Kyungsoo watches Jongin’s fingers. A smile turns up his mouth, a small, curious quirk. " _Finally_ , you’re digging, are you?” he says.  
  
“Is this considered digging?”  
  
“You’re different,” Kyungsoo says. When Jongin is finished, Kyungsoo slides him the bottle and holds out his other wrist. Jongin squeezes out more lotion. “You always talk  _around_ issues, instead of  _about_ them. It’s--” He stops as if catching himself. “It’s different.”  
  
The lotion has a sharp scent, not a sweet one. Like the way vinegar attacks your nose, except more subdued. The smell floats in the air between them, clings to Jongin’s fingertips. “You’re way too unassuming for your own good,” Kyungsoo states.  
  
Jongin circles the lotion into Kyungsoo’s skin, and Kyungsoo tilts his head to the side, in that way that makes the lights dance across his face and light up the black wells of his eyes.  
  
“I could kill you whenever I wanted, if I wanted, and I think you know that,” Kyungsoo says. Jongin keeps moisturizing the wrist in his hand. “I know things that are impossible for me to know and yet, here you are—soothing the very hands that could slit your throat.”  
  
“Tell me about your friends, Kyungsoo.”  
  
“Are you asking about Chanyeol?” Kyungsoo says. “Because I know you read his file.”  
  
“Not particularly.”  
  
A long time passes before Jongin lets go of Kyungsoo’s wrists, and Kyungsoo takes back his arm, sliding a hand around the spot Jongin’s own had been. “What do you think?” asks Kyungsoo.  
  
“About?”  
  
“About what you read in the file.”  
  
Jongin splays his fingers on the table, palms down, staring at the empty spaces between them. “I think I’m surprised Chanyeol isn’t still in prison.”  
  
Kyungsoo laughs or grunts, or does a mix of the two, a concurring sound. “There are a lot of us. Many, many more than just me and Chanyeol.”  
  
“All a part of this anti-government agency?”  
  
Kyungsoo leans forward. “I’ll tell you something, Jongin. I’m not insane.” Jongin’s mouth sets. Kyungsoo laughs. Baekhyun’s voice saying  _crazies_ plays again in Jongin’s head.  
  
“No, but really, I’m not,” says Kyungsoo. “Sure. It was anti-government, what I did. I get whisked away to court for pulling some limbs apart and then I got max security prison staring me in the face as my sentence. Now, I don’t want max. So what do I do? I play the psycho card—no dad, prostitute mom, bad childhood. It was pretty easy.”  
  
_But Do Kyungsoo's another story. He's a grade A actor._ Jongin considers the set of Kyungsoo’s jaw, and still can’t distinguish fact from fiction.  
  
“Did your mom take care of you?” Jongin asks.  
  
Kyungsoo blinks at him. “She was a country girl, who got lost in the city. Many people get lost in the city.” Then, as if an afterthought he says, “I remember she taught me how to sing.”  
  
Jongin can’t tell if Kyungsoo had meant to say that. Kyungsoo makes that pinched expression, scrunching his nose, as if trying to dispel the words from his mouth and pretend they never happened.  
  
“So you just mean to say that you’re sane,” Jongin says.  
  
Kyungsoo laughs again. “No one is sane, Jongin. I think you know that. I think that’s what makes you different.” He traces patterns with his finger into the skin of his wrist, the red fading. “I’m just telling you the things you could have read in my file but didn’t. Take it as you will.”  
  
“But you were a part of that same anti-gov organization as Chanyeol?”  
  
“Chanyeol hacked databases. I was a kill-for-hire.”  
  
“An assassin,” Jongin says. “But you got caught.”  
  
“Oh, but I’d killed plenty before getting caught.”  
  
Jongin doesn’t doubt that, at least. From the corner of his eye, the guard appears in the door window. Jongin sighs and folds his hands into his lap.  
  
“Let’s go back to dreams,” he says. “Anything new?”  
  
Kyungsoo seems to consider. He curls his lips in. The light overhead casts shadows of his eyelashes under his eyes. “I dreamt you were a dancer,” he says, the way one would recite a poem, “A ballerino, leaping across a dark, empty stage.”  
  
The image appears in Jongin’s mind too. He wonders how Kyungsoo sees it. Then the room, filled with the smell of sharp lotion and sad, grey dust, suddenly becomes very strange to Jongin. As if the context in which they’re now meeting, in which they’ve only and always met, makes no sense. As if he and Kyungsoo were meant to meet in such different circumstances than the one they’ve been given.  
  
“And what did you think when you woke up?”  
  
He wonders who Kyungsoo is outside of this room. He wonders about Chanyeol, and the Kyungsoo that Chanyeol knows and if that Kyungsoo is different.  
  
“I think that you’re a wild soul in a box that’s too small for you,” Kyungsoo tells him, standing up and walking around the table. He cups Jongin’s face in his hands. “And you still try to cling to some idea of normality—cling to that goodie boyfriend of yours, whatever it takes to feel normal in this place of crazies. You’re too afraid to see what’s in front of you.”  
  
Jongin stares straight ahead. “What’s in front of me, then?”  
  
“Me.”  
  
A pause, and Kyungsoo lifts his eyebrow, waiting for a protest they both know won’t come. “I’m not afraid of you, Kyungsoo,” says Jongin.  
  
Kyungsoo speaks against his mouth, their lips meeting—sudden, soft, human. “No. No you’re not.”


	2. Chapter 2

// three years earlier

Do Kyungsoo wakes to the smell of blood, his own blood, and the cool press of a concrete floor against his cheek. One eye opens first. Then the other, crusted over, eventually follows suit, and Park Chanyeol sharpens before him.

“Oh, good,” Chanyeol’s voice booms in Kyungsoo’s head like a microphone with feedback. “You’re not dead.”

His entire abdomen screams like fire when he tries to sit up. He crawls over next to Chanyeol, who’s sitting at a spot under the window where the moonlight cuts a path in the darkness.

“Fuck.” Kyungsoo rests his head against the wall behind them. “I think I’d rather be dead, actually.”

“Oh yeah. You’re right about that.” Chanyeol’s left shoulder looks dislocated, but the expression on his face is as serene as always. Kyungsoo looks around, and has no idea where they are or how they got there. It looks like an empty warehouse. He can smell dirt and rusted metal and the general scent of stale old-ness. Maybe he could ask Chanyeol, but there wouldn’t be any point. The last thing he remembers is being shot, then blackness. The rest, he can probably fill in the gaps. Most likely, Chanyeol dragged his sorry ass to safety. Or whatever this is.

“I owe you one,” Kyungsoo says, as if it matters.

“I’m gonna remember you said that,” Chanyeol laughs weakly. The moonlight turns his hair a wine red. “When we’re in prison or hell, I’ll make sure to call you up when I want free food or something.”

A chuckle shoots up Kyungsoo’s throat, involuntary. “Jesus. You’re a real fucker, aren’t you?”

Chanyeol shifts, holding his shoulder with a wince. Kyungsoo stares at a random point in front of them, a gaping hole of darkness, and wonders what lies beyond it.

“Who turned?” asks Kyungsoo. “Was it Baekhyun?”

Chanyeol doesn’t say anything. Kyungsoo wasn’t really expecting an answer.

“What do you think prison is like?” Chanyeol says.

Kyungsoo squeezes the blood out of his shirt. It mixes into an ugly, thick colour with the grey dirt on the ground. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t picture myself in there.”

“That’s disgustingly optimistic.” Chanyeol holds his shoulder as he laughs.

“I really don’t.”

“Let’s say we go in, do our time, and get out,” Chanyeol says. It feels like they’re staring at the same, obscure point in front of them. “You think you’d return to this job?”

The truth is, it doesn’t even register in Kyungsoo’s head as a question. Even with a bullet lodged somewhere in his stomach, even with the sharp, metallic scent of blood all around them. Even then, it’s not a question.

“I’ll see you when we’re out, Chanyeol.”

In the distance, the police sirens approach them, louder and louder.

Red and blue lights shine through the window, cutting starkly through the white moonlight. The sirens flash and ring in their ears. The rush of footsteps. The ground rumbles. Kyungsoo tunes it all out, pretends the noise is something peaceful like ocean waves, and he begins to hum an old fishing tune he once heard from his mother.

Chanyeol closes his eyes next to Kyungsoo, sleeping maybe, with that lopsided smile on his face as if he’s already dreaming.

 

-

 

“I don’t think you kill for the pain,” Jongin says. “I think you do it for yourself.”

Kyungsoo is sitting on the table, his feet swinging back and forth. He holds his head up to the white lights like he’s tanning on a beach, like he’s somewhere that isn’t here. “You’re doing it again,” he tells Jongin. “Overcomplicating.”

“You know, you don’t need to kill to feel important in the universe.”

“No. I don’t, you’re right,” Kyungsoo says. He regards Jongin with something searching, but only for a second. Then he blinks, and it could be teasing but Jongin would never truly know. “I hear the other thing is love.”

Jongin raises an eyebrow. He would look back and wish that he had his notepad, at least for this day. He wouldn’t write anything, just draw an ocean, with paint spilt into it—a fiery explosion, the way Jongin always imagines Kyungsoo’s soul. “Yes, there’s love,” Jongin says. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Love is too grey for me to understand,” Kyungsoo replies, “I’m not like you. I only see in black or white. Alive or dead. Fixed or broken. I’m not like you. I have no in-betweens.”

The smile he gives Jongin is not one that says goodbye. The kiss he places on Jongin’s lips is an invitation.

 

-

 

The story that makes its rounds in the following weeks says suicide, because no one wants to think about it as anything else. The counsellors are gathered in the staff room one day, and their stony-faced supervisor goes off in a rather rehearsed speech of sadness and regret. Fake sounds of sympathy interject every once in a while.

Then, they are dismissed back to their work. And the day carries on. The weeks carry on. Jongin is handed two new files, scheduled to start by the end of the month. He opens neither.

The police ask him to ID the charred body that they find washed up on a river bank, many days later, because there is no one else they can really ask. The skin is black to a crisp. A hand is missing, and it’s not even clear whether the eyes are in their sockets. Jongin stares through the glass window in the morgue and tells them, “It could be him,” so that they leave him alone.

Teeth samples from the body come back positive. Jongin is interviewed by the facility director and many, many doctors. Each time, he tells them variations of the same thing. Mostly, he tells them what he thinks they want to hear.

“Suicide? Oh, it was certainly possible. Guy was on Level Four security. Wore handcuffs all day. It takes a toll on a person. Maybe he snapped.” And the doctors nodded and checked boxes on the papers in front of them, like everything matched up and everything made sense—as if a soul as wild as watercolour explosions could be contained in those checked boxes.

“You don’t believe it, do you?” Sehun asks him one day, over lunch. Jongin looks across the cafeteria, to where Byun Baekhyun sits alone peeling the skin off his grapes. His face, characteristically relaxed, seems tense today. “You don’t believe in the suicide?”

Jongin lifts a shoulder.

Sehun hums, considering. “Then what do you think killed him?”

In his mind, Jongin sees the blacks of Kyungsoo’s eyes. Like the backstage area of a magician’s show, there are secrets back there—grand, ol’ secrets. In Jongin’s mind, the show must go on.

“I don’t think anything killed him.”

 

-

 

In his mailbox, Jongin receives a bottle of unscented body lotion. He unscrews the cap, unravelling the tiny paper rolled up inside. There is a typed address, and then a messy string of handwriting.

_I dreamt you were a dancer. A ballerino, leaping across a stage. Except the stage was lighted this time._

 

-

 

The address leads Jongin to a warehouse, an hour from the city. The road peters away gradually as he drives until the ground is no longer paved, just a vague dirt pathway.

He skirts the perimeter of the warehouse, shifting from foot to foot. Then he stops in front of the front door and pounds three times. He can hear the sound reverberate through the other side.

Chanyeol blinks at him when the door swings open. The wind swirls dust into the air, and Jongin feels himself inhale it into his lungs. The unfamiliar feeling ignites his senses, like the way someone feels when they light a joint between their lips for the first time.

He passes the note to Chanyeol, who only glances at the handwriting and scoffs.

“That fucker,” he says, leaning on the doorframe. “Blowing his cover for a pretty-boy.” He eyes Jongin up and down. “You really sure you want to be here? You make any wrong moves and you could be sitting on the opposite side of the counselling table at a psych ward, my friend.”

Jongin folds his slip of paper, and imagines the explosion of paint in water—the way it curls and bends, wild and uncontained.

“Maybe I was always on the wrong side to begin with.”

 

 

 

//end

**Author's Note:**

> \- you guys should google paint in water! i'm slightly obsessed with it   
> \- as always, things never turn out quite the way you plan and i apologize for the mess of this story.  
> \- in the original draft, there were some weird, supernatural elements, and-- yeah... i cut that... out..
> 
> \- i don't bite, if you have questions. please feel free to ask! i'm always curious what people think about these open endings! x


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